Many thanks to Miles Welch for giving us permission to repost his blog article. This is the second installment in his series on self leadership. You should check out his blog called Developing Next Generation Leaders to read more awesome articles: mileswelch.com. Miles has served the local church as a pastor and leader for 20 years, and has been at 12Stone Church (Lawrenceville, GA) https://12stone.com/ since 2001.
In the first post, I defined self-leadership as “a proactive process where leaders first seek self-understanding, and then use it to intentionally direct their lives.
In order to embark on the journey of self-leadership, we have to first disentangle our minds from perspectives that keep us passive. As humans, we have a curious tendency to embrace ideologies that absolve us of personal responsibility. Perhaps it is overwhelming to believe that we dictate the outcome of our lives, so we adopt perspectives that let us off the hook. Self leadership begins when we reject unhealthy, passive perspectives like the four below:
1. The Pre-Determinist Perspective
I hear too many Christians undermine their personal responsibility by saying, “God will do what He will do.” Like most lies, this idea is cloaked in half-truth. We hide behind the truth of God’s sovereignty and wrongly believe this absolves us of responsibility for our actions. Wrongly applied, a pre-determinst perspective renders self-leadership unnecessary.Proverbs 21:31 reads,”The horse is made ready for the day of battle but victory rests with the Lord.” Solomon wisely walks the fine line here: we are responsible to make the horse ready (self-leadership) but God ultimately gives the victory (God’s sovereignty). The perspective in this verse frees us up to self-lead. And, strangely, God seems to reserve His sovereign victories to those who prepare the horse.
2. The “Go where God tells me” Perspective
I’ve worked with young leaders for years, and often ask them where they want to be in five or ten years. The most common answer is some version of, “Wherever God wants.” I believe young people say this because they like options; they like the open road in front of them. I get it, but the flippancy is disappointing. Without direction, self-leadership is pointless. How do you prepare for “wherever?” This perspective confuses a God-led life with an un-led life, mistaking spontaneity for Spirit. A self-led life and a Spirit-led life are the same thing; we seek the Holy Spirit until He gives us His purpose, then we lead ourselves toward it in His power.
3. The Victim Perspective
Leaders with a victim perspective blame other people or circumstances for the way their lives turn out. To be sure, all of us have been wronged by others and cheated by circumstance, some dreadfully so. All of us have legitimate reasons to cry victim. Not everyone, however, adopts a victim perspective. We adopt a victim perspective when we allow the wrongs to turn into anger or entitlement. This perspective gives people and circumstances power over us that God never intended them to have. When we reject a victim perspective, we don’t deny legitimate wrongs, but we also don’t allow ourselves to be defined by them. It is a necessary step in self-leadership to take ownership for the decisions your make and the outcome of those decisions.
4. The Postmodern Perspective
This one is a little philosophical but bear with me it is important. When we adopt a postmodern worldview, we adopt the deconstructionist belief that objective understanding is always tainted by our context (over-simplification, I know). This philosophy erodes our belief that we can objectively make decisions for our lives, which derails our self-leadership. A truly postmodern perspective taints everything we do with uncertainty. Thankfully, God has given us Scripture to bring the light of objective truth into the darkness of uncertain subjectivity.